Ok let's get started...

[Tastian]

There's already been talk started between the reps and devs and various issues have been brought up.  Issues ranging from focus items (still being decided, but I'll let you know soon as I can), AAs, PvP, GoD tuning, etc are all being mentioned already.  I want to start getting some feedback from everyone about a few things, but we are just now getting to post and I don't want to just dump 10 page long threads on the devs.  What I would like to do is first address some "general" EQ issues.  I don't want to get into AAs with this thread, or OoW issues, or whatever.  I've read over the previous threads and talked with a bunch of people so let me give you a couple examples of what I'm talking about and looking for.

-  Beastlord weapon caps.  HtH caps 25 points higher and by going with a 1hb or piercer with identical stats a beastlord loses ~5% dps currently.  

-  Beastlord aggro.  Between our nukes/dots/procs we are aggro mongers for the amount of damage we do even if we aren't slowing.  I know a lot of beastlords that dread tank switches or the MT going down.  Melee classes are...

War - Gets taunt
Pal -  Gets taunt
SK - Gets taunt & FD
Rng - Gets taunt and Jolt(s)
Monk - Gets FD
Rogue - Gets evade
Ber -  Gets confusing strike
Brd -  Gets Fading, gets song of Dawn

Beastlords simply don't have any form of aggro control outside of "hey don't cast SV it'll get ya killed" or "put your ED in your off-hand or bag it for a CoW for now", etc.  

These are changes that didn't come about because of AA or have anything to do with the new expansion.  They are simply general everquest issues with beastlords.  Pets were an issue, but the changes on test look very positive atm.  What I'd like is for people to comment on the above issues and others along the same lines.  Tell me what you think some of the "general" issues are and possible solutions.  Overall beastlords are in pretty good shape imo generally speaking (especially with current changes on test), but lets see what everyone has to say.  Once this has been covered and I submitt stuff I'll get into AAs, OoW, GoD, etc, but for now I'd like to try to stay on subject.  I know some issues have been around for awhile, but like I said I don't want to just use this like the /feedback command and spam them every other day.  I'd like to break it down a bit, make it as straight forward as possible.  I'll do whatever testing/number crunching is needed to fill in any gaps and I'm sure others will help with that too.  8)  

So, lets hear um, what do you think are some general beastlord issues and possible solutions to those problems...

[Bengali]

Weapon caps - longstanding problem, simple solution is to cap everything the same.   Right now it is extremely difficult to tell whether a 19/18 piercing weapon will net you more dps than an 18/20 hand to hand.

DoT aggro - one solution is to dramatically lower the amount of aggro that is generated by poison counters, and for those spells that they want to generate more aggro than they otherwise would (tash, maybe?) they can add more counters.  So for example if the aggro for poison counters was cut in half, they could raise tash to 2 poison counters if they wanted it to stay the same aggro-wise.

Pet heals - I'm old school so I think our pet heals should do something since it's the one area we shine considerably more than other classes.  My real issue with these is speed.  The amount healed isn't too bad, but the speed of the heals totally sucks.   A 9 second 2100 point heal is pretty useless -- my pet is usually dead before I can land this (I fight in GoD most of the time).

Solution:  beastlord heals are similar to cleric heals for the first half of our progression; they should finish that way too.  Healing of Sorsha should be something like a 2100 point heal for 458 mana and a 3.75 second cast time (this makes it closer to supernal light, which is a 2750 point heal for 600 mana, and the same cast time).

Mage and necro heals should be rebalanced to be a bit faster too, since they suffer from the same problem.   They should be balanced so that they are less efficient/powerful/whatever to a similar extent as they are compared to current beastlord heals.

Pet heals become more important when zoning isn't killing them all the time and you actually care about keeping them alive.

[Skratchen]

An issue that I keep getting reminded of daily on raids is when I receive spot heals from rangers that have their newest level 65 heal.  It seems that SOE is trying to distinguish rangers and beastlords by creating diverging paths and not sharing this new GoD heal spell.  I think it would be great if beastlords would have got a smaller scale shaman-like 1000 hp 4-tick HoT (without the negative slowing or snaring effect).  It would be a fair way to differentiate rangers and beastlords without shortchanging beastlords with a group buff that hardly makes sense at this stage of the game (group IoS).

Another issue that I've noticed, though it probably isn't the biggest beastlord issue in the land, but never the less I think should be addressed.  Is there any way for the Developers to make the Ferocity worn effect (not our spell buff) work for beastlords (and bards for that matter) so that we could receive the benefit of more possible double attacks?  I was really looking forward to saving up dkp for such an item and benefitting from the effect.

[Tastian]

Good list beng.  

I agree about the weapon caps and that it does cause issues when choosing certain weapons.  It also removes certain upgrade options as a weapon that looks like it should be a decent upgrade is actually a very minor one or not one at all in some cases because of the lower skill cap and how beastlord damage works.

On the issue of DoT aggro though I'm more concerned with "tick" aggro atm personally.  I am ok with casting a DoT being a lot of aggro (atleast a relative amount of aggro to a similiar nuke).  However, the "tick" aggro on dots goes up with critical affliction and burning affliciton (nuke aggro doesn't go up with focus/AA) and it's also far more random.  Even a dot like plague that is low initial aggro that catches a few crit ticks is going to generate hundreds of points of unwanted hate for you.  I'm working on the numbers right now, but it's not unlikely that with the OoW DoTs we'll see cases where if the first tick of the dot were to crit it'd be more aggro than initially landing the dot.  

I'm definitely open to hearing what others think would be the best solution though and this is something I'm discussing with other classes that use dots as well.  I think if you make landing the dot be relative to landing a simliar damage nuke then you ignore aggro from focus and ignore aggro from crits.  Also you have immediate feedback.  Have you ever seen someone not know they'd over dot'd the mob until it was too late.  If you cast and get aggro you stop, but if you cast and it lands then you cast another dot and now suddenly the ticks are building up and the aggro is going up you are just SoL.  Finally, it doesn't apply to beastlords but SCS effects the intial landing of a dot and doesn't seem to effect the tick portion of aggro.  

Pet heal is another good issue in my opinion.  It's always funny to me how many people quote me bst pet healing or use it as an arguement and outside of pet mend AA I almost never heal my pet.  9 seconds is a lot of damage I'm not doing and hard to time with everything you might be casting/doing.

[Skanda]

If you want a fix for our spell casting aggro then find out if they would concider giving us access to the Spell Casting Subtletly AA that Shamans get. That should help with casting aggro. The melee aggro is a little harder to manage, I wouldn't mind getting some sort of Jolt like spell. Maybe give us some self buff like Spirit of Flame/Snow with the aggro reducing proc.

Personally I'm not too worried about pet healing so much as I'd like to see us get the upgraded healing spell that Rangers got with GoD or like Skratchen mentioned a heal over time spell. Anything that would improve my healing abilities.

I agree with the weapon caps issue. Think that needs to be looked at.

[Deiadrox]

I'd rather not have spell casting subtletly aas thanks.  Sure it would be useful for raids and such but when I'm tanking in a ldon or something I really need that extra aggro.  In my opinion we need a similar set up to rangers.  A spell like jolt to spam,  and maybe(I might be asking too much) a aggro spell like flame lick for tearing aggro away.  A decent combo i guess would be spell casting subtletly and somethign like flame lick, but I think SOE would consider that a "double upgrade"  even though it's hitting one bird with two stones.

[Incite]

Beastlords simply don't have any form of aggro control outside of "hey don't cast SV it'll get ya killed" or "put your ED in your off-hand or bag it for a CoW for now", etc.

I think mages are more in need of aggro control than us.  With recent upgrades to the discipline system I have no problems with aggro, although to be fair I am very hard on tanks, teaching them to hold aggro well (SK habits die hard).  I'm afraid I'm against asking for an agro reducer.

Having our weapon skills on par with each other would be nice, and by that I don't mean reducing the HtH cap.   :wink:  Something I think should be changed across all classes is the piercing cap; having it out of sync with other weapon skill caps makes no sense at all.  Rogues have their special affinity with piercing represented in backstab after all.  

On the more cosmetic side, I'd like to see the ogre pet turned into war boar.  This makes sense to me as ogres must choose Rallos Zek as diety and his home is packed with the war boars; yes boars would have to be added to Feerott, but I don't see this as a big deal, boars live in all sorts of forests.  

Also cosmetic, being able to name pets.  No I don't care that other people would name their pets stupid things, it'd be a cool thing to have.  Other people naming their pets dumb names is a bonus ... I know not to group with them then.   :D

[Goretzu]

Weapon caps are definately my no. 1 issue and really effect every BL from 50 up to some degree or another.

Just raising 1 more to equal to (or within a few points of) H2H would be very nice.
Rasing 2 or them all even better.

[Jkal_Shihar]

Well, with me just recently coming back from my long hiatus.

I aggree weapon caps need to be looked into.

I also aggree with the heals. There are too many instances where I might need to heal my warder or spot heal someone in group.

I hate to agrue the aggro issue though. So I am gonna say it.
Can we tank?? Yes.
Where we designed to tank?? No, imo.
Can anyone tank?? Pretty much (depending on a few factors that is).

The biggest bet that goes on in my guild during raids is how long can I keep aggro off me. Call me phobia, I use to play a ranger and hated tanking on him also.
If I wanted the tanks job I would have made one. We do need something to "jolt" the mob off of us. We do generate a bit too much even without dots or nukes. But this is just ones opinion.

[Vidyne]

"In my opinion we need a similar set up to rangers. A spell like jolt to spam, and maybe(I might be asking too much) a aggro spell like flame lick for tearing aggro away. A decent combo i guess would be spell casting subtletly and somethign like flame lick, but I think SOE would consider that a "double upgrade" even though it's hitting one bird with two stones."

We have this already, its a lvl 9 spell for 10 mana, it just has the off effect of fearing the mob if someone out aggros you or you step away from the mob.

Once I get a few casts in and get that initial aggro wit Flash of Light, nothing can out aggro me, nothing has, and I doubt anything ever will.
However in those first few seconds of building it, Ive lost it a few times to shamans and wizards and such....    Slow + malos + Dot > my slow + FoL

But Fol is extremely fast cast and has hate equiv if not more to our 65 slow.  It just makes it so you have to stay beside the mob.

[Dakat]

Weapon cap to 250 on 1hb, pierce to equal that of h2h.  Hell, even a bard gets 250 in all their weapon skills.

[Caali]

There are a couple issues I'd like to see tinkered with.

1. The resists % on our slows. It's gotten better I find in GoD, albeit I haven't parsed anything, but in some content (most noticeably PoP Earth/Fire/Water/Air) I find our slow is being resisted quite often. I'll sometimes have to cast it 4-5 times for it to stick. I'd like to see a small lure component added to our slows. Twice ok, three times occasionally I understand but wasting an entire fight trying to slow is a little much.

2. Mitigation of damage. As a non-elemental equipped beastlord (until recently), I can tell you we are severely underequipped to handle the mobs in GoD. We need some kind of change, either in the mobs, or how we receive damage to help us.

But Fol is extremely fast cast and has hate equiv if not more to our 65 slow. It just makes it so you have to stay beside the mob.

FoL is a nice toy but should not be considered as a standard tool for us. It is too dangerous to use anywhere crowded because as soon as there are no PCs in melee range there is a considerable chance the mob will take off and bring back lots of friends. Situationally useful not something I keep loaded much anymore.

I agree with both issues raised by Tastian as well as the healing issues for warders. Although there is an alternative there with Mend Companion, the AA ability.

[Elder Griksh]

I agree with the Weapon Caps issue and the speed it takes for the 2100 pet heal to cast. Maybe a another smaller heal with a quicker cast time may be the answer (maybe 1200 cast time 3-4 secs mana cost 345)

As for agro control i like being able to pull agro off other when needed. I trio with a Cleric and Enc all the time and i have to maintain agro. Dot /slow/ disempower agro is the best way for me to do that.

Having said that, when i do group with a tank with hate procs i still find that i pull agro off him. Maybe, as already stated, a hate reducing proc like spirit of the flame/snow would help out in this situation.

I think another a new Heal at 65 for the beastlord would be inappriopiate. Given that we have a 428HP heal and Paragon which is a very good Group HoT (1600hp with SCR) would cause the class to become out balanced. Granted it would make soloing so much easier and we would see more Beastlords at soloing in 2-3 tier planes, but i feel that this would cause a lot of evny from other hybrid classes.  This however does not discount the idea from maybe getting it at a higher level maybe 68+.

[Breko]

One important thing

If we get a quick heal over time spell (mini-topor) or whatever, please let it be in the Short Duration Buffbox. (the one bard songs and such go in)

I generally don't have enough buff slots left for regen unless there's a shammy in the group, and even less if the mobs are casting lots of debuffs. Same is true for my group, my heal would just get in the way of a real torpor or celestial heal. Short duration buffbox would fix it up real nice =)

And as long as i'm here, putting cleric HoT's and torpor/qui in the SDBB would be awesome too. OOh, and paragon! I hate having paragon not stick on someone because they're full on buffs and got tashed or something.

I'd rather have faster pet heals than a jolt, but I generally don't have problems with aggro. (I'm not saying other people don't, i'm sure raiders and people who fight in harder areas and people who have long enough fights to use dots all have a hard time not pulling aggo, it's just not as much of an issue for me.) At this point pet heals are pretty much for soloing, or after the fight (if the pet survives). The thing that wouldn't help (me, at least) at all, would be to give us a new, fast cast, inefficient pet heal. They gave us a bunch of those in the 50's, and I never used them. I don't want to keep 2 pet heals memmed, one for fast, one for efficient. I'd have to un-mem Flash of Light or something, and that's just no good ;)

Raising 1hp/2hb/1hb skillcaps would be ok, too. =)

[Felidae]

Swarm pets.